LBi helps Newell Rubbermaid's Graco reinvent itself as a family-focused brand by bringing the experience of home to the online world.
The placed-based sensibilities of Newel Rubbermaid's Graco brand are evident in LBi's work for the established baby-centric company, and part of a momentous effort by the 66-year old company to shift from a strictly manufacturing business to one with an emphasis on branding and marketing. Reshaping its online presence is a central element of that transformation—and critical to conjuring the sensibilities of home around which the brand hoped to shape its identity.
To that end, LBi was hired to create a website experience that capitalized on an existing brand platform named "From the Heart," which was designed to provide a heightened level of emotional engagement among consumers. To that end, LBi strove to activate the emotional triggers that inform the parent-child connection. Recognizing that these triggers are highly associative with notions of home and family, the LBi team sought to engage these sensibilities through specific verbal and visual pathways.
Visually, LBi adapted offline brand guidelines to develop a unique web-centric look and feel, combining a colorful palette of dot patters with a selection of full-bleed and soft-focused imagery. It is currently teasing out a design framework that mimics the graphic and textural appeal of old-time home movies, employing projection imagery to elicit the sensibilities of home and family.
LBi spotlighted the unique ways in which Graco product development is guided by parents' real-life experience.
From a narrative standpoint, LBi aligned Graco products with unique lifestyle categories that indicated the action the products facilitated. The LBi team developed five unique entry paths based on normative parenting cues, including paths named Engage, Explore, Soothe, Nest, and Nurture. Each invites users into a portfolio of products that facilitate those 'care states.' Car seats and strollers, for instance, help parents explore, while activity centers help engage, and highchairs help nourish.
As Creative Director Ivy Garcia notes, "These new entry points—or care states—to the product provide an emotive lens through which consumers engage the brand. Our idea was to demonstrate to consumers a depth of undrstanding of their most important concerns."
To reinforce this promise of parenting expertise, LBi established an interview section in which child development experts interviewed Graco product developers, drawing out the ways in which Graco product development is guided by "parental cues" drawn from parents' real-life experiences, reinforcing the notion that Graco's products are inspired by parents' own experiences, and not the typical economies of scale dictated by production costs.
Launched in January, the new gracobaby.com promises to deliver a uniquely relevant repository of product and editorial content for young parents, shaping a community of resources that contains all the cues of parenting, family, and home—freedom to explore, reassuring themes, and a promise of safety—that are critical to the growth of a baby brand crossing a unique threshold in the evolution of its brand image.
LBi is furthering this effort by laying the foundation for an online style guide that establishes best practices for adapting offline creative for web applications.